When Valerie Ziegler’s high school social studies students seek out political news, most of them don’t turn on the television or browse the homepage of The New York Times. Instead, they get on their phones and open up TikTok.
So Ziegler, an economics and Advanced Placement United States Government and Politics teacher at Abraham Lincoln High School in the San Francisco Unified district, spent time in September teaching her class to parse these videos as savvy consumers.
After the presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, Ziegler asked students to investigate the provenance of the TikToks they watched that analyzed the back-and-forth between the nominees. Who’s providing this information? And what’s their agenda?
“At its root, we’re trying to make informed citizens. … I’d like to think that we’ve given them the skills to navigate the media, to be able to navigate the content that comes to them,” said Zielger.
This adversarial stance—evaluating a source’s bias and possibly challenging its claims—is central to teaching civics and history, educators and experts say. It’s different from how students would approach a novel or an expository essay in an English/language arts class. And it’s a key example of how literacy skills operate in social studies.
Students need these discipline-specific literacy skills to do well in history, government, civics, and economics classes. But they also need them for life after school, said Sam Wineburg, the co-founder of the Digital Inquiry Group, a nonprofit social studies curriculum organization, and an emeritus professor of education at Stanford University.
They teach young adults how to “contend between the cacophonous voices of a democracy,” he said. “You don’t just look at something at face value. You say, ‘Wait a second, who wrote that?’”
What ‘literacy’ means in social studies
This distinction is important now as districts nationwide consider how best to structure their overall literacy programs.
One idea that’s slowly gained traction is the notion of building students’ general content knowledge about science, social studies, the arts, and culture through what’s known as “knowledge-building” reading programs—ELA curricula that incorporate those topics, often through groups of paired fiction and nonfiction texts. Research shows that when students know more about the world around them, their reading-comprehension abilities benefit from this background knowledge.
But these reading programs can’t take the place of dedicated history or civics instruction, experts caution. In part, that’s because they don’t always teach the ways of reading, thinking, and writing that are unique to social studies.
“There are important disciplinary literacy skills and practices that aren’t going to show up in your ELA program,” said Nell Duke, the executive director of the Center for Early Literacy Success at Stand for Children, an education advocacy organization.
Literacy is an umbrella term, Duke said. It can refer to reading and writing skills in a reading class, but it’s not restricted to that subject. Students use literacy skills throughout the school day.
At a basic level, students need to be able to read and write well to access content in other subjects, Duke said. To read a textbook in history class, for instance, requires general reading-comprehension skills and an understanding of academic vocabulary. Students might use skills like summarizing text or using evidence to support their claims in written responses to questions.
But there are literacy skills that are specific to the social studies subject students are studying, said Duke. In economics, students need to be able to make sense of different graphical representations of data. In geography, they need to be able to read a map.
And in history, students need to be able to identify a text’s source and explain why that provenance matters.
How historians read documents, and how it differs from other fields
“There’s a very specific way that historians read documents,” said Joel Breakstone, the executive director of the Digital Inquiry Group.
Historians want to know who wrote a primary-source document, and for what purpose, because those factors shape how the reader would interpret the information. They triangulate information presented in one text with others, “seeking out points of similarity and departure,” Breakstone said.
And they want to place text within a moment in time, he said. To analyze the Gettysburg Address, for example, students need to understand what was happening during the Civil War when President Abraham Lincoln delivered it.
Placing documents in context is essential to reading in history, Breakstone said, and the way a student might approach it in that class differs from how they might approach it in another class.
Students could analyze the Gettysburg Address “as a piece of rhetoric” in an English classroom, he said. (In fact, the Common Core State Standards suggest it as a sample informational text that 9th and 10th graders could work with in ELA.)
But, he said, “it’s a different thing to read it as a particular document delivered by a particular politician at a particular moment in time.”
Teaching students to ‘get the facts’
The distinction between general literacy and discipline-specific literacy skills can be murky, and, in general, teachers say that students should master the former in elementary school, while work on the latter becomes increasingly intentional in middle and high school.
To prepare students to think this way in social studies, they need to get comfortable reading and writing in the subject—and teachers need to explicitly foster those skills, said Monica Brennan, a K-5 instructional coach at Hillside Elementary School in the Farmington district in Michigan.
As a former 2nd grade teacher, and in her current role, Brennan has used a few different curricula that attempt this goal.
In one, social studies lessons included a lot of reading and writing prompts. In another, students explored the same topic across disciplines in an interdisciplinary unit—learning about rice, for example, by exploring what the food means to different cultures and investigating how seeds grow.
In the reading curriculum she works with now, some lessons are centered on social studies topics. She helps teachers draw connections between those topics and the content in their social studies periods.
“I think there’s not one way to do it. But what I’ve started to learn as an educator is that we want some fluidity in our classrooms,” Brennan said, referencing the delineation between social studies and ELA. “That’s part of my role, helping teachers to see that it’s OK for there to be blurry lines there.”
Before elementary schoolers can get to more discipline-specific ways of reading and writing, they need to master the basics, she said.
At its root, we're trying to make informed citizens. … I'd like to think that we've given them the skills to navigate the media, to be able to navigate the content that comes to them.
In one civics lesson that Brennan taught, students wrote to their local government about improving equipment at a local park. Lessons on persuasive writing had to precede that activity.
“I’m giving a really clear framework of what it is—you give an argument, you elaborate on it,” Brennan said. “There are still some ELA activities that need to take place in order for that social studies lesson to be successful.”
By the time students get to high school, they’re learning and refining discipline-specific ways of evaluating text and persuading audiences.
When Ziegler, the California teacher, has taught U.S. history, she asks students to analyze a painting that claims to depict the first Thanksgiving.
“Initially, students look at that and say, ‘Wow, … it must be like this, and they’re all happy,’” Ziegler said. But she guides students to investigate further questions—when was this painting created? By whom?—that uncover that it was painted in the 1930s, hundreds of years after the event supposedly took place.
The lesson she uses prompts students to consider how an author’s time and place, and their motivation, might influence the source they create.
Ziegler wants her students to pose those questions to the information sources in their own lives, too, whether they’re learning about local ballot initiatives, seeking tips on filling out student financial-aid forms, or trying to understand headlines about unemployment numbers.
“I hope that we’re giving them the skills to say, ‘OK, I’m going to get the facts and I’m going to sit down with people and discuss this and not just see what I get online but really make an informed decision,’” she said.
